The present invention relates to coding of audio signals, and in particular to high frequency reconstruction methods including a frequency domain transposer such as a harmonic transposer.
Conventionally, there are several methods for high frequency reconstruction using harmonic transposition, or time-stretching or similar. One method used is based on phase vocoders. These operate under the principle of doing a frequency analysis with sufficiently high frequency resolution, and the signal modification in the frequency domain prior to synthesizing the signal. The time-stretch or transposition depends on the combination of analysis window, analysis window stride, synthesis window, synthesis window stride, as well as phase adjustments of the analyzed signal.
One of the problem that inevitably exists with these methods is the contradiction between the needed frequency resolution in order to get a high quality transposition for stationary sounds, and the transient response of the system for transient sounds.
An algorithm which employs phase vocoders as, for example, described in M. Puckette. Phase-locked Vocoder. IEEE ASSP Conference on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, Mohonk 1995.”, Röbel, A.: Transient detection and preservation in the phase vocoder; citeseer.ist.psu.edu/679246.html; Laroche L., Dolson M.: “Improved phase vocoder timescale modification of audio”, IEEE Trans. Speech and Audio Processing, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 323-332 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,549,884 Laroche, J. & Dolson, M.: Phase-vocoder pitch-shifting for the patch generation, has been presented in Frederik Nagel, Sascha Disch, “A harmonic bandwidth extension method for audio codecs,” ICASSP International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, IEEE CNF, Taipei, Taiwan, April 2009. However, this method called “harmonic bandwidth extension” (HBE) is prone to quality degradations of transients contained in the audio signal, as described in Frederik Nagel, Sascha Disch, Nikolaus Rettelbach, “A phase vocoder driven bandwidth extension method with novel transient handling for audio codecs,” 126th AES Convention, Munich, Germany, May 2009, since vertical coherence over subbands is not guaranteed to be preserved in the standard phase vocoder algorithm and, moreover, the re-calculation of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) phases has to be performed on isolated time blocks of a transform implicitly assuming circular periodicity.
It is known that specifically two kinds of artifacts due to the block based phase vocoder processing can be observed. These, in particular, are dispersion of the waveform and temporal aliasing due to temporal cyclic convolution effects of the signal due to the application of newly calculated phases.
In other words, because of the application of a phase modification on the spectral values of the audio signal in the BWE algorithm, a transient contained in a block of the audio signal may be wrapped around the block, i.e., cyclically convolved back into the block. This results in temporal aliasing and, consequently, leads to a degradation of the audio signal.
Therefore, methods for a special treatment for signal parts containing transients should be employed. However, especially since the BWE algorithm is performed on the decoder side of a codec chain, computational complexity is a serious issue. Accordingly, measures against the just-mentioned audio signal degradation should not come at the price of a largely increased computational complexity.